Early Modern Women | 2019
The Special Value of Precarious Patrons: Lucrezia Agliardi and the Tradition of Italian Laywomen Church Builders
Abstract
This essay documents the way in which Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova (ca. 1484–1558), a noblewoman of Bergamo, built the church of Sant’Anna at Albino (1528–57). In doing so, she provided a new focus of devotion for worshippers, introduced the female Carmelite Order to her diocese, and enhanced the architectural composition of her adopted town. The importance of viewing such a commission as part of a tradition of female patronage of churches in order to gauge the power of female agency to shape architecture and the urban fabric in early modern Italy was first emphasized by Carolyn Valone (1992) and Marilyn Dunn (1994). They demonstrated how church building offered laywomen public prominence in Catholic Reformation societies that otherwise counselled conformity to gender norms of female dependency on male leadership and reticence. Valone, for instance, stressed that architecture was the “most visible and expensive form of art,” letting women “have an impact on public spaces